<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">In a discussion on Akashvani’s Spotlight program, Rohit Deo Jha, Joint Director, National Health Authority talked about Strengthening Health Infrastructure through Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana. He said that Jan Arogya Yojana ensures good health cover or quality hospital services for the citizens of India, especially the poor and vulnerable section.</p>”<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b>&nbsp;</b></p>”<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana was launched by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 23rd September 2018 from Ranchi. The scheme currently covers around 12 crore families. That would mean roughly around 55 crore individuals. This scheme ensures a health cover of Rs 5,00,000 per family per year for all these 12 crore families.</p>”<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br />”</p>”<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Mr. Jha said that currently, Jan Arogya Yojana is the world's largest health assurance scheme which is covering 40% of India's bottom population.&nbsp;Highlighting the key services of this scheme, he said that Jan Arogya Yojana is basically for inpatient services that is called hospital services, so all kinds of hospitalisation services across 27 specialties. We have around 1949 procedures for which we provide treatment under this scheme and also there is one unspecified procedure. So basically like everything which includes into this cover amount of Rs 5,00,000 for the second and tertiary credit treatment are provided.</p>”<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br />”</p>”<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Talking about key achievements under the scheme, Mr. Jha said that this scheme as on date has roughly catered to around 6.15 crore hospital admissions and that has cost the government around Rs 78,000 crore. In terms of this scheme, beneficiaries are provided Ayushman card and around 28.5 crore individuals have been provided Ayushman card as on date. He also talked about the benefit which has accrued to the poor and vulnerable people. He said that, while the government has spent around Rs 78,000 crore, these poor people, and vulnerable people have actually saved more than Rs 1.25 lakh crore out of pocket expenditure.</p>”<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br />”</p>”<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #222222;">In discussions about&nbsp;the contribution of this scheme on healthcare infrastructure, especially in the rural areas and the other tier cities, Mr. Jha said that while the core activity or core function of this scheme is to provide free healthcare services to the eligible population, at the same time, one of the byproducts of this scheme is that it has effectively strengthened the healthcare infrastructure across the country. Under this scheme, all the public hospitals are deemed empanelled. So, that would mean that any public hospital which has an inpatient facility available, they are deemed automatically empanelled under this scheme. Now these public hospitals are reimbursed the cost of the treatment at par with the private hospital. So, the public hospital gets two kinds of money, one the budget, budgetary allocation that they are continuously getting, apart from that, this is over and above their budgetary allocation, which is the money which is reimbursed to them. Now, this is an untied fund available to the public hospital. It is expected that the money which they are getting under this scheme, they would be using it for augmentation of the infrastructure and providing better amenities to the patients. So, thereby this scheme has been effectively able to augment the health care infrastructure in rural area and also urban areas.</span></p>